media

They said the people who supported him were fringe elements, just a bunch of extremists without popular support. Rabble-rousers making up the audience of beer halls; a bunch of drunk fools getting into trouble. Just a bunch of children.

His book was a bestseller.

His explicit hate and racism was said to be just for show. Not genuine, but just a way to gain the masses trust and attention. Interesting how no one considered what the fact that such hate would gain the trust of the masses actually meant.

No one thought he would make it very far in politics. He was a joke. There was no way he would actually win.

When he did, the whole world looked at the electors in shock, confusion, and a sense of horror. No one thought he would win.

Even after he won, no one thought he was really a threat. No one believed that he would actually manage to achieve his horrifying promises. It was all just rhetoric they said. He was too incompetent. He was too weak.

When armed resistances started up, protesting and threatening violence against any who spoke against him, it was excused as the childish antics of angry young men. Not a representation of what they really thought, but just a manifestation of the anger they felt at being disenfranchised by bad economic times.

The rise in vandalism and violence was excused as childish antics and not an indication of how they really felt.

The world mocked him. Comedians at the time drew attention creating caricatures of him as a bumbling angry clown with a funny appearance.

Thinking back to high school, it was not uncommon for students to ask “Why do we have to learn this? When am I ever going to use it?”

It’s not an unfair question. In Ontario, every university degree demands a grade twelve university level English credit as a pre-requisite. If you are planning on studying mathematics, what’s the point in reading Shakespeare? How do the works of Charles Dickens or Jane Austen assist someone who plans on spending their whole lives working in a lab? Or a cubicle?

I’ve been re-watching Grey’s Anatomy as my background show. I got pulled back into it after re-watching the episode where Dr. Bailey has to treat a Nazi. There were enough things going on in the episode that I just recognized based on watching the show a long time ago, and there are times when I can’t help it. Not remembering things, especially stories, irritates me and I feel the need to refresh my memory.

The following rant will contain spoilers for the first three maybe parts of 4 seasons.

One thing that struck me quite a bit on this go round, is how the nice men, the “Honourable men”, the so called good guys of Seattle Grace Hospital, are all abusive assholes.

For as long as people have been talking about social justice online, there have been people, trolls really, who make a point to argue, harass, and otherwise engage in actively hateful and bigoted behaviour. This has been the case in every online community I have been involved with: the feminist community, the atheist community, disability community. There is always someone prepared to defend the vilest behaviour you can think of. If you are a representative of these communities: a Person of Colour, a Trans Woman, a Disabled Person, if you are a member of some minority, the number of people who target you in particular escalates.

The sheer number of people committed to spreading hate has made places like the comment boards on Youtube a place to be avoided. Many magazines and blogsites have closed their comment sections. More than one writer, activist, organizer, and so forth has been forced off the internet as a result of death threats, threats of rape and violence, dealing with a constant barrage of slurs and hatred, and even having their private information released to the public.

One of the most annoying things we face as people with chronic illnesses is people who decide they know how to cure us, while having no idea what we are going through. People who don’t realize how condescending their advice ends up being, and frequently how wrong or even dangerous it is. The constant need to give advice or to become the recipient of every single article on the subject of our conditions is something a lot of us put up with, if not actively struggle against.

Most of the time, the urge is spurred on by good intentions. So it gets me particularly angry when it is the failure of science reporting that is the cause of the most recent flood of misinformation being pushed my way.

In the last two months, Crohn’s Disease has trended on Facebook twice: once to brag that a vaccine against Crohn’s has been discovered (it hadn’t) and once to let everyone that they’ve discovered what causes Crohn’s (they haven’t).

In both cases, the articles were written in a way that suggests that the authors (or their editors) had no real understanding of science. That or they willingly inflated a story knowing it was fraudulent, and supported their claims with information that appears significant when it isn’t.

I wrote a post responding to some of the objections I had seen the Black Lives Matter demands at the Pride Protest, specifically those relating to Police presence. I wanted to continue addressing further objections that I have seen raised. Specifically those dealing with a misunderstanding of racism.

It is not surprising that the majority of people, and white people in particular, don’t fully understand the concept of racism, especially those people who are white. Like many subjects at school, what we were taught wasn’t actually the truth, but a simplification that was meant to act as a primer to make the truth easier to understand as we developed our understanding of difficult concepts. As we grow in specific subjects and develop our interest in them, we begin to piece away at the earlier lies to reveal more complicated truths – the end goal of evolution is not a human being but rather survival and procreation – the solar system is not simply made up of 8 planets and the sun – actually you can find the square root of a negative number but the answer is an imaginary number, also imaginary numbers are a thing – we teach half-truths because we need to build a foundation on which our eventual understanding can be based as a launching off point.

The trouble with this when it comes to matters of social importance, like racism, is that the majority of people, and especially those in positions of power, never move past an elementary introduction into concepts that have a daily impact on countless lives.

In school we are taught that racism is the discrimination or prejudice against a person based on their race. We are taught about triangles who make fun of a circle for being different, or use the examples of grizzly bears encountering panda bears for the first time. We try to explain this difficult concept to children by appealing to their internal sense of fairness and empathy by making them think about how much their own feelings would be hurt if someone were to make a decision about them based on something like how they look.

For those who haven’t heard, during the pride parade, after a moment of silence for the victims of the Orlando Shooting at Pulse Club, Black Lives Matter Toronto staged a sit in halting the parade. Their protest had the following list of demands:

I sat down with Trav Mamone of Bi Any Means to discuss my book, my new vlog, disability activism, atheism, and more. You should take a listen if you get the chance.

Listening through the podcast I realized that I accidentally used an expression I’ve been trying to eliminate from my vocabulary because of it’s ableist implications. A good reminder that even people who care about these issues make mistakes and it is up to us to make amends when we do. To those who were hurt, I apologize and endeavor to do better in the future. Mea Culpa. I’m sorry.